RAG & Agents

Cross-Encoder Reranking

Scoring (query, document) pairs jointly with full attention between them, applied to the top 20–100 candidates.

Why interviewers ask about it

Hybrid search improves recall; reranking improves precision at the top. Diagnose recall@50 first - if it is low, no reranker can help.

Combining dense vector retrieval with sparse lexical retrieval (BM25), usually fused by reciprocal rank fusion.

This term is part of the free AI/ML Engineer interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.